By 2030, there may be as many as five billion users of the metaverse, and this giant ecosystem will nurture an economy of its own. EV member Ronit Ghose and I dive into the path to get there on the podcast this week, as he offers key insights to the intersection of decentralised finance in the metaverse. Ronit is Head of the Future of Finance programme at Citi, and he recently published a report Metaverse & Money: Decrypting the Future. We covered some of the insights in yesterday’s Charts of the Week.

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Listen to my conversation with Ronit here, and read the highlights below.

The big ideas

• The metaverse can be thought of as an evolution of the internet, where virtual and physical mesh together seamlessly. We currently tend to think about the metaverse through the lens of popular game platforms such as Minecraft or Roblox, but the ecosystem will grow much larger and beyond entertainment.

• A “device-agnostic” metaverse will allow for access through many devices, including smartphones, game consoles and desktops. It will encapsulate everything from entertainment and media to education, training, enterprise and commerce - including a menagerie of money types. By the time it’s in full effect, both traditional forms of currency and digitally-native forms such as cryptocurrency, stablecoins and central banks digital currencies will be integrated into the metaverse economy.

• Ronit estimates that the device-agnostic metaverse will cater to a total addressable market of $8-13 billion by 2030.